Moreover, he would have considered himself unworthy of the confidence that his patron had shown him from the very first, opening his archives to him, letting him live in complete intimacy with his household, if he had made any inquiries about the Frédets. From the moment that there was a question of some family secret, to start a conversation on this subject with the old relative who acted as housekeeper would have been as impossible as to try and make one of the young girls talk about it. He knew no more of the affair when the day after the conversation the Prince and he arrived in Paris than he did on the preceding evening. During the journey he had noted the increasing preoccupation of his companion, who, when they reached the station, said to him: "I do not know as yet where we shall put up. Let us take a cab and we will stop at some lodging-house. I used to know a place in the Rue de Bourgogne, in the neighborhood of the Chamber of Deputies. We will be near the Rue de Grenelle, where our business is. The d'Ivrea house is the same that the marshal lived in under the Empire."
"Next door to the house of the Duc de Feltré?" returned Alfred Boyer. "It was only three days ago that I was transcribing the page on which he relates their meeting on the sidewalk in front of their houses on his return from Waterloo, and his refusal to return the Duc's salutation. How finely the passage concludes: 'Perhaps it was not just,' he writes, 'but at that time every French officer who had not fought at Waterloo filled me with horror. I should add that if the Duc de Feltré deserted us, at least it was not, as in so many other cases, for money. He was my friend, and I attest that I have always known him to be an upright man with clean hands.'
"Upright and with clean hands," repeated the Prince. "Yes, those were his words; I recall them, too. That might have been his own device, do you not think so? My brother repurchased the house," he added after a pause. "I do not know how they have furnished it, but the façade should not be changed. It is of the seventeenth century and has the grand style of that period. You shall judge of it yourself this afternoon, for I do not intend to remain here long. I count upon going to the d'Ivrea house in this same cab as soon as we have engaged our apartment in the Rue Bourgogne. You will not leave me—I am not paying a visit to a relative. I have come here to obtain some papers that belong to me by right as the senior. You have been good enough to engage your services as historian for our family until the end of the publication of the 'Mémoires.' Your place, then, is with me."
They had taken their places in the carriage while the ex-colonel was thus formulating the program of a proceeding made the more mysterious by these words, and by the irrevocable determination that they indicated.
During the three-quarters of an hour that it took them to reach the Rue de Bourgogne, where the lodging-house stood, and then the Rue de Grenelle, they were silent, the Prince absorbed in his thoughts, and the young man out of respect for a sadness of which he divined the cause, without being able to determine its precise nature. The sadness was changed into an actual contraction of pain when the carriage stopped in front of a high porte-cochère, above which could be read this inscription, recently restored, as the brilliancy of the lettering indicated: "Hôtel d'Ivrea." Alfred alighted first and waited before the open door, ready to assist the Prince out of the carriage. The latter did not move. This last effort was almost intolerable to him.
"I thought at first I should send you in my place, my dear Boyer," he said, finally deciding to alight, "but she would not receive you. It is me that she wishes to see. She has adopted the only way, my veneration for the marshal. Let us go in—but it is so hard!"
Never in all those weeks that they had lived almost constantly together had he uttered such intimate sentiments to his companion. His irritation, which he scarcely gave himself the trouble to conceal, increased still more as they crossed the court at the back of which rose the beautiful gray façade he had spoken of, with its high windows and its ample mansard roof pierced with bull's-eyes. Though Alfred Boyer was much moved by the family tragedy, of which the Prince's attitude was an index, he could not but admire the noble aspect of the structure in which the heroic Frédet had thought to find rest. But if the exterior of the ancient house harmonized with the legend of the hero, the interior offered a no less striking contrast to it. The extraordinary excess of gaudy upholstery, the multiplicity of trifling ornaments, and the total absence of real works of art, the petty coquetry of the curtains, everything from the very entrance stairs and the vestibule gave an impression of false luxury and cheap imitation. The walls and ceiling of the salon into which the two men were shown were draped with blue satin, the assorted portières were held up by silver-fringed curtain rings; double curtains of heavy silk and lace veiled the windows. The sumptuous upholstering of the furniture utterly lacking in taste, the overladen garnishment of the mantel capped the climax, and made of this sumptuous apartment an almost questionable place. It fairly reeked with orders from the fashionable draper, of bank bills, and nothing showed personal taste. The abundance of coronets scattered everywhere proclaimed the parvenu. That the woman who ordered such furnishings for the austere mansion should be the Duchesse d'Ivrea was one of those paradoxes of fate that amuse only the unthinking. When one has such a passionate adoration for a hero as the compiler of the "Mémoires" had for the Duc d'Ivrea, such antitheses seemed to be a profanation.
Alfred was not surprised, then, at the visible repugnance shown in the face of the actual bearer of the name and arms of the Frédets during the few moments passed in the salon while they were waiting to be presented. The Prince had sent word by the servant that he was there with the gentleman who had charge of the publication of the marshal's papers.
As if turning his back on this cheap luxury, he had gone and leaned against the window, from which his rude hand had roughly pushed aside the flimsy curtains. He looked out on a narrow garden to which the first shoots of spring were already giving a touch of green, and which was vulgarized by a Japanese kiosk with colored windows. When the servant returned to the room, Alfred could see that the eyes of the sturdy hunter were suffused with tears.
"Well?" he demanded almost imperiously. "Madame la Duchesse is awaiting Monsieur le Prince," was the reply, "but alone; she is too ill this morning to receive two visitors."—"What did I tell you, Boyer!" exclaimed the Prince, not caring whether or not he was heard by the footman. "She wants me to come to pay her a visit, but I have not come with any such intention, and I will not have it so. I came with you to obtain the papers. Let her receive you or not in her bedroom, that is of no importance. You are none the less here in the house, and officially. Wait for me here then. It will not be long." Ten minutes later the irascible nobleman appeared again, holding in his hand a large sealed envelope, which he displayed, saying: "It is the first restitution, and the most important for us: the correspondence with Moreau."